Transcending Barmen: confessing in word and deed - Barmen Declaration, Barmen, Germany - includes related information on the Barmen Declaration - Cover Story

Christian Century, May 11, 1994 by Victoria J. Barnett

In the years since 1945, the definition of "radical," particularly in religious circles, entails a clear political and ideological alignment. In part, this is a legacy of the Holocaust. But the radicalism of the church at Barmen was that it refused to align itself with any leader, government or ideology, instead committing Christians to a fundamental, confessionally based opposition to any demand that deviated from the principles of Christian belief.

The paradox was that, in declaring the church independent of ideology at that historical moment, Barmen committed the German churches to a clear position with respect to the Nazi state. This is what gave the Barmen Declaration its radical potential. The faith of Confessing Christians was inextricably tied to the church's identity in the world--to its identity in a National Socialist society in 1934. The words of Barmen are not explicit politically, but they are very clear theologically, and therefore the church's position with respect to Nazism, at least in the moment of Barmen, was clear.

Barmen's radicalism, then, is not in the church's explicit alliance with a specific cause or ideology, but rather in its freedom, in all areas of human life, to proclaim another standard for behavior and belief. In the context of Nazi Germany, the logical consequences of this should indeed have included a sense of solidarity, of responsibility for others and for some Confessing Christians they did, as Bonhoeffer made clear: "In the language of the Bible, freedom is not something man has for himself but something he has for others ... Being free means |being free for the other,' because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free."

From this standpoint, despite the subsequently ambivalent record of the churches under Nazism, the Barmen Declaration continues to be an inspiration for Christians in dictatorships and in situations governed by injustice and violence. Unlike most church statements, which usually find their historical niche in a file cabinet, Barmen remains relevant, despite the fact that many of the modern

Catholic and Protestant statements are far more politically explicit and radical than the Barmen Declaration appears to be.

The words of Barmen make clear what the sides are; what Christians have argued about ever since is what these clear sides imply with respect to other issues. In other words, Barmen established the criterion for the debate. This is why it has been possible for Christians in such diverse circumstances as South Korea, the former East Germany, South Africa and Brazil to find significance in the words of the Barmen confession.

THE SIGNIFICANCE of Barmen--then and now--emerges not only from the words of the declaration itself but from the contexts in which people find it meaningful. For a small group of Confessing Christians, Barmen was not just a statement, but a confession that they wrestled with, that their own lives enlarged upon. They transcended the words of Barmen by making them concrete with respect to the victims of Nazism. Usually when we Christians speak of transcendence, we mean the move from the worldly realm to the spiritual realm. But transcending Barmen meant, in essence, the reverse: moving beyond words to deeds. The solus Christus of the declaration's Thesis I became a declaration of independence from the German Fuhrer. In setting theological limits on the sovereignty of the state, Thesis 5 broadened the scope of Christian ethics. In other words, Barmen was, for those who took it seriously, a starting point.